1. Field of Invention
This invention relates to display racks and particularly to gondola display racks of the type having shelves cantilevered over a base from vertical supporting posts. More specifically, this invention is directed to an improved shelf for use in a gondola display.
2. Description of Prior Art
Typically, a gondola display has a base, vertical gondola posts extending upwardly from the rear of the base, and one or more gondola shelves cantilevered from the vertical posts over the base. When used to support and display, for example, beverage bottles, the gondola display shelf typically has column defining divider wires mounted atop the shelf and extending from the front to the rear of the shelf for maintaining the bottles in columns or rows. Such a gondola display is disclosed for example in U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,872,567 and 4,809,855, assigned to the assignee of this invention.
Manufacturers have traditionally employed divider racks mounted atop gondola shelves for neatly organizing and separating different items or products for sale. These divider racks are typically constructed so as to allow rows of items to be displayed along the depth of the gondola shelf. The number of rows of items displayed on any particular shelf depends on the shelf width and the width of the displayed product. The rows or channels defined by the divider rack have heretofore often been of a width dimension creating a rather loose fit of displayed product within the divider rack channels because the standard width shelf often resulted in a fraction of a width channel being wasted. While a loose fit is desirable in order to allow articles to freely slide over an inclined shelf surface toward the front of the gondola display shelf, usable shelf space is forgone to the extent that the gondola shelf channel widths exceed a whole multiple of the product or article width.
According to one aspect of this invention, excess space between displayed product and channel sides is minimized while still allowing the product to freely slide forward to the front of the display. To this end and according to the practice of this invention, one one-half width channel is located at one end of the shelf but that one one-half width channel is utilized when two identical gondola shelves are abutted such that the two one-half-width channels together create an additional usable full-width channel. Thereby more efficient use is made of the available shelf space.
Another aspect of this invention is predicated upon an improved mechanism for attaching and locking a gondola shelf divider rack atop the shelf, which mechanism absolutely locks the divider rack to the shelf such that it may not be inadvertently dislodged from the shelf, even when severely impacted by product sliding on the shelf.